The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa has given Uncut an exclusive preview of its plans for a major new exhibition exploring Dylan’s work in 1966, and the firestorm that surrounded it.
The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa has given Uncut an exclusive preview of its plans for a major new exhibition exploring Dylan’s work in 1966, and the firestorm that surrounded it.
The revelations come as part of the 13-page cover story in the new Uncut marking the 60th anniversary of that watershed year in Dylan’s career, also featuring new interviews with Dylan’s bandmates and others offering glimpses of Dylan at work during the making of Blonde On Blonde; and a deep dive examination of how Dylan’s controversial ’66 tour with The Hawks was received in the British Isles.
Uncut’s April 2026 issue is available to buy here
Uncut’s April 2026 issue is available to buy here
Scheduled to open this summer, the Dylan Center’s new exhibition, titled Thin Wild Mercury, is set to be its most ambitious yet. “1966 is a remarkable period,” the show’s curator, Mark Davidson, tells Uncut. “It’s on a different level. It’s basically Dylan creating some of the most iconic music he’s made–while taking on the world.”
Davidson guides Uncut through key areas of Thin Wild Mercury, which will plunder the contents of the Bob Dylan Archive and beyond to mount an immersive, multi-media experience, showcasing artefacts including Dylan’s own working manuscripts, rare audio, vintage promotional material and ephemera, unseen photographs and recently restored film footage to examine Dylan’s blazing creative journey across 1966 in unprecedentedly rich detail and depth: from writing and recording Blonde On Blonde and hitting the road with the Hawks, to jousting with the world’s media and sitting for Andy Warhol. “It’s Dylan as spectacle, in a very combative way,” Davidson says: “‘This is me – deal with it.’”
Elsewhere in the issue, in a new interview, veteran multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy, the band leader on Blonde On Blonde, gives Uncut his first-person account of recording the music Dylan has called “the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind.”
“None of us had ever seen anything like it before,” McCoy says, recalling a sequence of late-night sessions that turned Nashville on its head. “We’d do anything to stay awake, because you never did know when Dylan was going to say, ‘OK: now let’s do it.’ He could be ready to go any minute.”
Alongside McCoy’s vivid testimony of 4AM calls, other eyewitnesses describe encounters with Dylan around the making of the record, and we uncover a nugget about Johnny Cash’s connection to the album that has gone unreported for six decades.
Additionally, scouring the archives of the regional press, from the Ballymena Weekly Telegraph to the Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald, Uncut reconstructs how things played out in real time when Dylan and the Hawks brought the divisive battle to “go electric” to the UK and Ireland. Revisiting hostile reviewers (“A noisy, blaring, ear-splitting disaster”), traumatised fans (“I started to cry”), and frothing journalists (“Don’t ban this weasel-like little man. TIME WILL SHOW HIM FOR WHAT HE’S REALLY WORTH”), we capture a series of snapshots along the speeding, tumultuous road to “Judas!”
Finally, we report on Where The Music Had To Go – a major new biography exploring Dylan’s relationship with The Beatles, including a dive into their 1966 hook-up at London’s Mayfair hotel, Dylan’s visit to Liverpool and the Dylan vs Lennon limousine double-header filmed in DA Penebaker’s Eat The Document film. “There are lost film scenes with Dylan and Lennon together,” author Jim Windolf tells Uncut. “At the Bob Dylan Center archive, I found notes written by Dylan while he was editing Eat the Document (probably in July 1966) that seem to pertain to Dylan-Lennon scenes, apart from the limo footage. Still a mystery, when and where those scenes would have been filmed…”
Find out more about the Bob Dylan Center
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